ELIZABETH AIRD: Patricia Smith became a Boston celebrity because she wrote about the poor, the powerless, the usually silent people whose voices and stories don’t get much ink in newspapers these days. That’s what makes her lying doubly revolting. Her pose was all about authenticity, integrity, truth. I heard her speak at two conferences, one a U.S. national writer’s conference in Seattle, the other for Canadian women journalists. Both times she held the audience rapt with her voice-of-the-oppressed shtick, reading her gritty poetry about stories she had purportedly covered as a journalist. Now she couldn’t buy her way onto the podium.

It’s particularly infuriating when someone like Smith turns out to be a heel, because of her woman-of-the-people pose. What could be more arrogant than lying to your readers?

That’s why Smith’s farewell column provoked the gag reflex. She said she sometimes “tweaked” her columns because she was so driven to leave the reader “indelibly impressed.” She was just trying to do too much, she said.

Notably, she didn’t have the guts to tell readers exactly how many times she “tweaked,” other than to say: “It didn’t happen often, but it did happen.”

There are a couple of things about the Smith story that go beyond a passing scandal in a faraway city, in a line of business that doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to most people.

One is the reaction to Smith’s lying. Instead of firing her butt right out the door, her editors “asked for her resignation,” as it is being put. Then, of course, they let her write her farewell column.

Presumably they felt readers were owed an explanation and an apology direct from Smith, but letting a confirmed liar write once more is like letting a surgeon convicted of malpractice do one last appendectomy. You do the crime, you do the time, and surely the fit punishment for a newly revealed egomaniac would be to stop her from unloading yet more drivel on to readers who have no reason to believe her professed remorse.

The kid-glove treatment is consistent with a view of Smith that is more mournful than scornful. The reaction from her peers is less angry than empathetic. It seems that a lie perpetrated even by someone paid to be a professional truth-teller isn’t an appalling breach of trust, but a mistake that the rest of us should understand and forgive.

A few colleagues of mine have even argued the gravity of what Smith did, saying that “we” (newspapers? all media?) play with the truth every day.

Too many readers probably think that, too. After all, how many people bother to distinguish the relative quality of information in the legitimate media from the dross in the tabloid papers and “news” shows, and in hype-machines like “Entertainment Tonight”? Any media-saturated sod can be forgiven for lumping all media into one dubious pack earnestly reporting that the Spice Girls are really, truly sad that Ginger is gone and that Bruce and Demi’s split has hit Hollywood hard.

Too many people, and too many of them journalists, have shrugged and given up the expectation of truth and good sense.

When no one cares enough to stand up and condemn a liar — and so far, I haven’t seen the word applied to Smith — we assure ourselves a steady stream of effluent from all quarters.

(Aird writes for The Vancouver (Canada) Sun, from which this is excerpted.)

 A LETTER BY CLIFF BERNARD: There is more truth in one chapter of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” than in all the Boston Globes ever printed. There is more truth in the works of Shakespeare than any collection of journalism. Smith may have presented fiction as facts, and for this she has paid a heavy price. But her fidelity to the truth of the human condition, with all its quirks, its injustices, its tragedies, and its moments of redemption, never wavered.

(From The Boston Globe)

EILEEN McNAMARA: We cannot stop ourselves from bemoaning the “tragedy” that has befallen her as if she were not the architect of her own demise. We condemn the lies and praise the voice in the same breath, as if they are not inextricably linked. In a piece criticizing her fabrications, Dan Kennedy, media critic for the Boston Phoenix, actually describes Patricia Smith as a journalist who “spoke truth to power.”

The ombudsman for the Boston Globe reported dozens of phone calls running in Smith’s favor in the wake of her forced resignation. Sadly, a lot of readers apparently think she didn’t do anything the rest of us don’t do routinely.

Compassion has its place — no one wants to see another human being self-destruct — but what ever happened to righteous anger? Why are we so afraid to condemn unequivocally the betrayal of a public trust?

The short answer is race, the single subject we are unable to discuss without shifting in our seats and averting our eyes. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz would have us believe that Patricia Smith was the victim of a double standard. To the contrary, she was the beneficiary of one. Her fall had nothing to do with her race; her rise had everything to do with it.

The dominant newspaper in a city with a troubled racial past was so seduced by the power and lyricism of her words it forgot that we publish a daily newspaper here on Morrissey Boulevard, not a poetry anthology.

An honorable commitment to open these pages to people long unrepresented led to a less-than-honorable tradeoff. Patricia Smith’s images were so mesmerizing, her rage so galvanizing, that we chose not to see the deceit at their core.

It was the worst sort of racism that kept us from confronting the fraud we long suspected. If we did ask, and she did tell, we might lose her, and where would we be then?

(McNamara, a 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, writes for The Boston Globe, where this originally appeared.)

NORMAN SIMS: If I were the editor of The Boston Globe, I would not have fired Patricia Smith.

Smith was fired because she made up some quotes and a character in four of her Metro columns. The Globe said Smith, Mike Barnicle, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Eileen McNamara — the three Metro columnists — had been warned three years ago not to fabricate materials for their columns. Even Smith’s friends on WriterL agree that once she had been warned by Globe Editor Matthew V. Storin not to make up materials for her column, then she had to be fired after breaking the “rules of the road” that he laid down three years ago.

I’m wondering where Storin got the rules. At the University of Massachusetts, I teach the history of journalism, part of which involves the “column.” Historically, there aren’t many rules but lots of models.

The column as we know it was invented at The Chicago Record by George Ade, who wrote “Stories of the Streets and of the Town” from 1893-1900. Ade used alter-ego characters such as Artie Blanchard, an office worker; Pink Marsh, an African-American philosopher who worked in a barber shop; and Min Sargent, a self-assured woman working in a bustling Chicago high-rise. Ade’s columns delighted the men and women on the Halsted Street trolley, as they now delight historians and sociologists. They were entertaining but serious and they always treated people with respect. Except when Ade used stock characters, it’s impossible to tell which columns were fictional.

Ade was followed by Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote about “Mr. Dooley,” a fictional Irish bartender who delighted Dunne’s own anger about social conditions. The Chicago-style column survived into the era of Mike Royko, who died last year. One of Royko’s characters was Slats Grobnik, a Polish friend from his neighborhood. Slats was actually based on real people, but readers always assumed he was fictional. Royko could switch back and forth between fictional columns and hard-nosed street reporting, something Patricia Smith couldn’t do.

A stylistic thread runs from George Ade to Finley Peter Dunne to Mike Royko to Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith at the Globe.

In the 1890s, newspaper editors started to control some of the practices of their reporters. It was not uncommon for reports to be fabricated in one aspect or another, and editors, for obvious reasons, tried to stop the practice. Editors fenced off that kind of behavior into the “column,” where rules didn’t apply. The Globe says Barnicle has never made up any characters in his column, and Smith admits to making up one. But if they did do it — much as it seems to shock the editors — they did it in the finest tradition of column writing.

Unfortunately, the Globe rules meant Patricia Smith couldn’t develop fictional characters in her column. I think the mistake in the Smith case was not just hers, but also Editor Matt Storin’s. When he told the three Metro columnists they couldn’t fabricate, he changed the game. Eileen McNamara recently told an audience in San Diego that the standards for any columnist should be no different than those of a reporter. Not so. The lack of rules in columns makes us love them. Inside the column you can be personal, have a voice, attack people, tell stories about your “friends” real or imagined, be funny, talk about your family, and it’s up to the reader to evaluate it all.

(Sims is chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts. This is excerpted from a piece written for WriterL, the online forum.)

WALT HARRINGTON: I’ve been following the fact vs. fiction debate at least since I arrived at The Washington Post as a features editor, and the young Janet Cooke became one of my reporters. She sure could get a good quote out of a person. It was only after her fall from grace that I realized she was no doubt embellishing. I didn’t suspect this in my two months of working with her, because she didn’t embellish beyond what was believable. I didn’t question her because I knew — and still know — that people tell some folks things they won’t tell others. That’s the ineffable part of what a good journalist does. And some special people are better at it than others. That’s one of the ways we are judged within the rules of our game.

I have no problem with journalists who want to become artists in what I think of as the full sense of that word. The problem comes when they don’t want to tell their readers that they have made the switch, changed the rules of engagement. I don’t care whether readers think we are or aren’t using confirmable details — facts — to tell our stories. I care that we tell them one way or the other. The reason journalists don’t tell their readers that they are embellishing, making up details, turning dramatic corners by altering sequence, making things neat by ignoring important evidence to the contrary is because they know they would then be judged by a different standard ...

Readers respond more strongly when they believe our stories are true to their sense of factuality. If readers were as moved by realistic fiction as they are by realistic nonfiction, magazines wouldn’t have replaced fiction with what are sold today as “true” stories. I think the literary part of literary journalism is judged less harshly than literature exactly because readers believe its literary quality is limited by the commitment to common-sense factuality. Journalists who play with what we agree to call facts are trying to have it both ways. They want to be judged by the lesser literary standard of journalism without accepting the challenges of the journalistic craft.

I’ve been writing articles about fine manual craftsmen for the last couple of years and been pondering the century-old debate about the difference between craft and art. One of the distinctions is that besides mastering the mechanics of his medium, an artist will often strive to identify and overcome the tacit and blatant rules that limit his work within that medium and break out, if that’s necessary to getting across his ideas. To the artist, ideas are everything.

Craftsmen, on the other hand, accept as a given the limits of their form and agree to work within it. If a craftsman wants to make wood furniture that curves delicately, he’s limited by the strength of wood. He can’t switch to plastic or steel even though the stronger material would give him the delicate curvature he wants and better evoke the “idea” he’s hoping to get across. His challenge is to be creative within the bounds of his craft’s rules. This self-imposed limit does something other than hinder his creativity — it pushes him to be more creative within his realm. He may come up with a new design that maximizes his material’s strength. He may come up with optical illusions that create the impression of delicacy. He may switch to a different wood or learn to use only stronger portions of his desired wood.

But tricking people into thinking that plastic is wood isn’t part of the deal. It breaks the contract the craftsman has with people who are buying the furniture because it is made of wood. But even more importantly, taking it would shatter the values of craftsmanship that the craftsman has agreed to accept when he characterizes himself as a fine woodworker. A craftsman doesn’t aim to throw off all the rules of his craft in service to unfettered thinking, profound ideas or larger truths. He agrees to accept those rules, expand the margins of the possible within them and ply his artistry within those constraints and possibilities.

If you are a journalist who wants to be an artist in the full sense of it, be an artist. But don’t claim to be a journalistic craftsman plying your artistry within the rules of the craft. Don’t pretend to be expanding the limits of what’s possible in a craft so many of us honor — a craft central to our pluralistic society and which is protected by fragile legal rights dependent on the public’s perception of its credibility. In Pat Smith’s case, we aren’t talking about cleaning up a quote for grammar, changing a pronoun to a proper noun for sense, or unconsciously shaping a quote through selective perception. We’re talking about pretending to one set of rules and playing by another. She pretended that she was one of those special people who can get folks to tell her what they won’t tell others. She pretended to be what she   wasn’t. That was the lie.

One of the fine craftsman I wrote about was Sam Maloof, a famous maker of chairs and a MacArthur “Genius” Award winner. He’s always being called an “artist” by artists. But he won’t hear of it, insists upon calling himself a woodworker. “It’s an honest word,” Sam says. “And that’s what I am — a woodworker.”

Journalist is an honest word, too.

We shouldn’t have to apologize for wanting to keep it that way.

(Harrington is a University of Illinois journalism professor, author and former writer for the Washington Post Magazine. He wrote this for WriterL, the online forum.)

A LETTER BY ROBIN B. SHORE: It was amazing to see all the letters in the Globe on Monday making excuses for Patricia Smith’s mendacity. Cliff Bernard writes, “There is more truth in one chapter of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ than in all the Boston Globes ever printed.”

This elevates Smith into company she doesn’t deserve.

Most idiotic of all was W. Ann Eriksen’s statement that it’s no big deal that Smith’s “creativity burst through some of her columns.” Gee, maybe President Clinton can use that one when it’s his turn to testify.

(From The Boston Globe)

MARK KRAMER: Patricia Smith invented no big stories, unlike outright news-hacker Stephen Glass. Her narratives included some conjured-up characters who voiced stock views afoot in any community. Her fictive cancer patient, “Claire,” for example, so longed for the experimental cures fed lab mice, she’d gladly “swallow the whole mouse.”

But the mildness of the misinformation Smith proffered hardly softened the wrath of journalists, and that’s revealing — of something harsh and also hopeful about the press community’s shared values.

Colleagues reacted resentfully and high-mindedly — the harshness, and the hope. Smith’s ex-colleague, Pulitzer prizewinner Eileen McNamara wrote, “the events ... are about journalistic integrity, a phrase Patricia Smith and her enablers at this newspaper have reduced to an oxymoron.” And Jack Thomas, the Globe’s ombudsman, swatted at Smith’s character and even her accomplished writing of poetry: “(W)hat Smith had done was to take the language she says she loves and twist it into something grotesque. She had ... made a burlesque of what is the soul of not only journalism, but all writing, and that is to write the truth.”

A month later, Thomas added, there’s “not even a clue as to why she would make up characters and quotations other than the possibility that she was lazy, intellectually indifferent, or  ... because of her ambition to achieve too much in too little time.”

These are scornful reactions, and the scorn is understandable, although imprecisely aimed. “Lazy” is nasty, but demonstrably wrong. An effortless edit easily within Smith’s writerly command could have made her concoction kosher without further legwork — try: “Imagine a dying mom learning that lab mice are cured by drugs that can’t yet be prescribed. You can practically hear her exclaim, “I’d swallow the whole mouse.”

“Intellectually indifferent” is dubious too. Over the past few years, thousands of working journalists across the country, enthralled by Smith’s talks at the Poynter Institute’s National Writers Workshops, gave her top ratings. That audience may feel betrayed, but not because Smith suffers “intellectual indifference.”

How should one feel, then, about an admired talent who does something destructive and self-destructive? Her misjudgment surely has human, probably woe-filled causes. But her actions harmed journalism, and journalists respond in kind. The harm was not that readers believed mild mistruth, but that they saw their newspaper standing behind mistruth.

 Journalists’ responses were of the sort reserved for those threatening a group’s highest values. Scorn is a social emotion. It rallies the group, vilifying and shunning while discounting personal excuses. Scorn is emotional fuel for a ghastly but functional repair job. Scorning excommunicates the perpetrator, cleanses the sullied group and reasserts violated order. Scorn does nasty redemptive work. Someone has to do it.

But don’t many journalists in no danger of being scorned also sometimes offer readers less than the most complete stories possible?

Don’t most newspapers distort the mission of truthtelling by devoting so much talent and space to sports and celebrities, to dining and dieting, to the trivially heartwarming, to shallowly reported takes on complex people and events, while offering too little serious (and costly) reporting on poverty, education, business-as-usual and governmental misregulation and mismanagement?

And isn’t ideal service to readers diminished when chains combine papers into regional monopolies and trim local reporting?

However one quibbles with this partial short-list of the trade’s vulnerabilities about accuracy, there’s clearly fault enough to remind us that high horses buck.

But, if fabrication merely stands among suboptimal practices for which reporters aren’t fired, why does it, in particular, provoke such vituperation? It’s institution-threatening; sports coverage and sentimentality aren’t. Fabrication is “one of the cardinal sins of journalism,” Smith herself acknowledged in her apologetic final column.

Although caught reprinting George Carlin’s jokes as his own, Mike Barnicle hung onto his Globe column until his fabrications were discovered too.

 Readers, reporters and management have identical interest in truthful reporting. If trust shatters, the enterprise of journalism does too.

Transgressions triggering mistrust of key organizations fall into a rare class of non-criminal behavior that sociologist Robert Weiss terms one-strike-and-you’re-out misdeeds. Scientists who invent data fit that category, too. It happens when the enterprise involved does crucial public good — as both science and journalism do — and when, to fulfill the group’s purpose, individuals must be entrusted with private discretion.

For all the squandered space and light stories in newspapers, the deal between readers and journalists remains pre-cast. Fiction writers may playfully invent their own deals. But reporters have taken on privileged, serious business, molded by history and sanctified by law, a counterforce to tyranny. Journalists may be entertainers too, nowadays, but they are still civic guardians, watchmen on the walls of the city of readers. In its reactions to confabulation, the profession strongly affirms the community’s sacred trust, however complicated by business considerations.

(Kramer, professor of journalism and writer-in-residence at Boston University, is the author of four books of literary journalism and several newspaper and magazine articles. He co-edited the anthology “Literary Journalism.”)

JOHN LEO: ... But Smith apparently doesn’t think of it as lying. She wrote: “I will survive this knowing that the heart of my columns was honest and heartfelt.” This is a somewhat ambiguous sentence, but it seems to be a claim that emotional truth (the stuff of fiction) justifies or excuses fictional techniques in a column. One media critic, Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, read Smith’s statement that way. “You get the sense reading her apology that she has the mentality of an artist who’s talking about the truth with a capital T,” he said. “But journalism is fundamentally about nonfiction.”

What makes this interesting is that so much journalism today has turned away from the old ideal of objectivity. Many reporters accept the currently fashionable postmodern theory that objective knowledge of any sort is a myth.

The postmodernists put quotation marks around words like reality and push their disciples to embrace the principle of subjectivity. One of the teachings is that there is no fixed history — history is created in the minds of historians. It is what historians choose to make of the past. Journalism often seems to come under this heading, too. Since objectivity has been declared a myth, journalism is inherently a subjective exercise in which the feelings and will of the journalist function to create the truth of what has just occurred.

“Throughout our culture,” the critic Michiko Kakutani writes, “the old notions of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are in danger of being replaced by the new ones of ‘opinion,’ ‘perception,’ and ‘credibility.’ ” At the least, we are living in a docudrama culture in which the techniques of fiction and nonfiction are beginning to blur. That’s why Patricia Smith’s defense of her emotional honesty is more alarming than the straightforward faking of Stephen Glass.

(Leo is a columnist and contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report. This is an excerpt from his column.)

A LETTER BY CONSTANCE S. KURTH: Last April 24, I read Patricia Smith’s column, “It all began with betrayal,” about Stephen Fagan kidnapping his daughters. As the grandmother of the two girls and the mother of Barbara Kurth, I was especially dismayed by the comments of the “cosmetologist,” Janine Byrne. I was appalled by her insensitivity, even cruelty, and her presumption in saying: “I got three kids, and I tell you, if they were missing all that time, I’d turn heaven over and shake God out to find them. I don’t trust her. In 20 years, I’d either have them back or know they were dead.”

Now I know that the insensitivity and cruelty came directly from Patricia Smith, and I applaud you for firing her.

I suppose it was the phrase “I’d turn heaven over and shake God out” that tripped her up.

I have read Smith’s self-serving and ever self-aggrandizing “apology” in the Globe. I am unimpressed and unconvinced. I read nothing that would lead me to believe that Patricia Smith is apologetic and feels terrible about this, as one of your editors said. She apparently thinks that she fabricated (lied about) characters and quotes because she is so wonderful there just isn’t enough time to spread all that wonderfulness around without cutting corners. She thinks that what she did is excusable because “the heart of my columns was honest and heartfelt.” After all, she “stepped in the lives of remarkable people” — and onto the backs of anyone she wanted. I suppose if you’ve been caught in the wake of the “mighty USS Smith” you should be grateful for the attention.

It was painful enough to read the cruel remarks of “Janine Byrne,” but to know they were fabricated in order to “leave the reader indelibly impressed” is even worse.

Well, Patricia Smith has indeed made an indelibly bad impression on our family and on many others, I’m sure. The Boston Globe owes my daughter, Barbara Kurth, a public apology. I don’t expect one from Patricia Smith. The only apology I would believe from her is, “I’m sorry I got caught.”

(From The Boston Globe)

A LETTER BY THERESA SULLIVAN BARGER: How could you, Mike? I grew up in the suburbs of Boston and can’t remember the Globe without Mike Barnicle’s column. It was the first thing I read in the Sunday paper. I decided I wanted to be a journalist before I reached high school, and I wanted to be the kind of journalist Barnicle was.

His stories grabbed you. They made you cry. They made you angry. They made you think.

It wasn’t just that he was a talented writer. He cared, and his columns helped right wrongs. I admired his amazing ability to find great stories and to tell them so beautifully.

When he was accused of lifting jokes from George Carlin’s book, on first blush I thought it was true. But then, after all, some of the jokes in Carlin’s book were in an earlier Barnicle column. Jokes get passed around. Not crediting the source of a joke didn’t really fit my definition of plagiarism. It was possible that he was telling the truth and he really didn’t intentionally lift the quotes despite his endorsement of the Carlin book on a Boston TV station. The loyal reader in me won out over the journalist in me that felt it was a pretty far-fetched story. ...

The public sees journalists in the same ethically challenged group as politicians and lawyers. Bill Clinton’s behavior certainly supports the theory about politicians.

But I always believed and still do that there can be honorable, ethical lawyers and journalists. My father was a lawyer who lived his life by example. He told his kids that not only should we behave honestly and honorably but we should do nothing that has even the appearance of being unethical.

As a writer, I have always believed accuracy and fairness must come first in every story not just before clever writing, but even at the expense of it.

There always will be a few journalists who, as the saying goes, “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” Sometimes those writers are viewed by editors as being better writers because their editors don’t know the full story. It’s a lot easier to have great quotes if you’re making them up. Television news magazines are notorious for slanting their stories at the expense of the truth.

But I thought Mike Barnicle was different. I thought he was so talented that he could tell a true story powerfully. And he could. But, apparently, like Bill Clinton, he had such arrogance that he thought he could get away with an occasional fabrication or act of plagiarism.

So the staffers in the Globe’s newsroom who cheered Barnicle’s resignation weren’t all motivated by professional jealousy. Maybe they knew Barnicle was fabricating stories as surely as they knew there was nothing they could do with that knowledge.

But, while I might feel differently if I were working in the same newsroom, I can’t feel happy about what has become of Mike Barnicle. My better judgment is telling me that my hero is not worthy of my admiration.

How fortunate he was to touch so many lives for 25 years. What a waste of a precious gift.

(This is excerpted from The Hartford (Conn.) Courant.)

MARK JURKOWITZ: When announcing Barnicle’s resignation to a newsroom full of anxious and drawn faces, Editor Matt Storin said it was time to move forward after a nightmarish few weeks.

Now, he said, “We have everyone on the same ethical page.”

At that point, the assemblage burst into applause.

(Jurkowitz is a writer for the Globe.)

A LETTER BY STEVEN BIEL: An arrogant rich guy cuts corners instead of putting in an honest day’s work, while the rest of us play by the rules and get screwed.

Sounds like a Mike Barnicle column.

***

A LETTER BY ROB HOLZEL: Thank you for standing up to Mike Barnicle. Thank you for standing up to Tom Stemberg of Staples. Thank you for standing up for integrity.

***

A LETTER BY MICHAEL PECK: A columnist is not a reporter. Neither Patricia Smith nor Mike Barnicle was paid to give us breaking news, report on current events or present facts. They were paid to express any opinion they damned well pleased, and in the absence of an opinion, an emotional reaction would suffice. Columnists exist to provide entertaining copy. That’s why they’re popular.

Perhaps it needs to be made clear that not everything in the paper is verified, ironclad fact. Otherwise, in this era in which the line between news and entertainment is more obscure than ever, there will be more confusion, more cynicism, and potentially a much larger tragedy than the sacking of two columnists.

***

A LETTER BY MARCIA AND STEPHEN SAMPSON: It is with disappointment that we read about the resignation of columnist Mike Barnicle.

He was a breath of fresh air in the pages of the Globe and one of the major reasons we continued to read it.

You’ve conducted a witch hunt against Barnicle under the guise of protecting “real journalism.” You do the craft — and Barnicle — a great injustice.

The Globe’s editor, Matthew Storin, wrote that “our action today ends an unfortunate chapter that began in what was probably a less ethical journalistic age.” No, I believe that “less ethical” journalism proliferates in today’s pages. Mike’s column was a welcome relief.

(Letters to The Boston Globe.)

HOWELL RAINES: The Globe dropped Ms. Smith like a hot rock, and rightly so. But upon her dismissal there were immediate rumblings that the newspaper had, for years, looked the other way when confronted with reports that Mr. Barnicle was writing what Mark Twain called “stretchers” in his colorful but apparently well-reported columns.

In what seemed a pathologically self-destructive or defiant act, Barnicle then published a column that used, without attribution, jokes very similar to those in George Carlin’s book, “Brain Droppings.” When challenged by his editors, he said he had not read the book and had got the material from a friend without checking its origin. There soon surfaced a tape of Barnicle recommending the book on television as having “a yuk on every page.” Barnicle told his editors that while he had recommended the book, he had not actually read it himself.

Amidst this hurricane of evasions and didn’t-inhale excuses, the Globe’s editor, Matt Storin, quite properly asked for Barnicle’s resignation. Storin later relented, saying that his original decision had been hasty and that it was unfair to give Barnicle the same penalty as Smith, since his lapse was so much more marginal than hers. With all respect, I can’t buy that.

Life is full of gray areas, but the intellectual contract that makes mainstream newspapering possible is stark and clear. Editors have to be able to trust what reporters and columnists write and say. Journalists do not make things up or present others’ writing and thought as their own. ...

At this newspaper and others, people have been dismissed for making things up. Major newspapers have all given lesser punishments to reporters for failing to attribute material first used in other publications’ news articles. The Globe’s vacillation in a case that combines borrowing and lack of candor with the editors illustrates a general rule. Public respect for newspapering is wounded when rules that would be enforced with doctrinal ferocity among the mass of journalists are lightened for a star who has great value to the paper. The damage is internal as well. It says to young journalists that the contract of trust that we ask them to sign — about what they write and what they tell their editors — is not really absolute or equally enforced.

This brings us to an important point about the sociology of journalism. Barnicle is an immensely popular figure in Boston and in the journalistic world. In the last few days, he has been the beneficiary of a vigorous public-relations campaign among the profession’s old-boy network. Important broadcast journalists have promoted the idea that  Barnicle was being sacrificed for minor mistakes so that the Globe could get by with firing a black woman. His middle-aged white male colleagues at the Globe have rallied around.

I am haunted by something I know in my bones. If you take Barnicle out of the picture and imagine instead Smith being brought up on the charges of using unattributed material and misleading her editors, she would not have such prominent and persistent defenders. That is because Barnicle, like this writer, is a product of a male-dominated, mostly white tribal culture that takes care of its own. A great deal of effort has been expended throughout journalism over the past 20 years to make sure the newsroom tribe includes every color, gender and sexual orientation. Long after Barnicle settles back into his column, the historical bottom line of this event will be that a white guy with the right connections got pardoned for offenses that would have taken down a minority or female journalist.

You’ll buy my position, of course, only if you believe in strict enforcement of rules about borrowing, lifting and leveling with colleagues, and if you believe, as I do, that if you have to choose between a worthy but erring colleague and the newspaper itself, you choose for the paper. After all, all the members of this profession know the rules when we sign up. They are rules based on a tradition of trust that cannot be ignored without stirring anxiety in the newsroom and suspicion among the readers.

(Raines is editorial page editor of The New York Times; this piece, which ran before Barnicle resigned, is excerpted from the Times.)

A LETTER BY ROSS M. LEON: I congratulate the Enquirer for its front-page apology to Chiquita Brands International Inc. due to errors and illegal information-gathering techniques. However, I am dismayed at the “$10 million-plus” payment to Chiquita, and particularly, at the complete lack of explanation to your readers of the terms under which this payment was made.

Clearly, the reports about illegal and unethical activities in Central America were based on information about Chiquita, which was at least partially factual. It is the Enquirer’s responsibility, once allegations have been made in the comprehensive manner in which they were reported, to now attempt to clarify which allegations are factual, which are not, and which others cannot be verified by legal means.

If, as I fear, part of the settlement with Chiquita involved an agreement to no longer report on this matter in any way, then this would constitute an egregious violation of journalistic ethics, much worse than the actions of a few rogue Enquirer reporters. Why? Because this would represent an institutional decision to deny readers the truth, which we are relying on the Enquirer to report. ... A vague, blanket “renunciation” just doesn’t cut it.

(From The Cincinnati Enquirer)

JOHN FOX: More than the official apology and monetary settlement, it seems that the central component of Chiquita’s agreement with the Enquirer was that the paper had to repudiate the entire series. Every word. Everywhere.

And the paper has.

“The Enquirer has now become convinced that the (series’) representations, accusations and conclusions are untrue and created a false and misleading impression of Chiquita’s business practices,” the official apology said. “We have withdrawn the articles from continued display on the Enquirer’s Internet Web site and renounce the series of articles.”

In other words, never mind. Never mind a year’s worth of reporting about Chiquita’s allegedly unsavory business practices in Central America. Never mind about allegedly unsafe working conditions on Chiquita banana plantations. Never mind that the Colombian government has launched an investigation into Chiquita employees’ alleged bribes of customs agents in that country. And never mind that Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, who visited Chiquita farms in Honduras, called the company “an evil institution for exploiting the poor.”

All of the above allegations were contained in the Enquirer’s May 3 special section or additional stories published over the following two weeks. None, except for the long stories on Chiquita’s overall business practices, relied on internal voice mails for their facts. Yet all have been renounced by Enquirer management.

“Workers sprayed in the fields,” a May 3 story with a dateline of Cocobola Farm, northeastern Costa Rica, contained this passage: “As two Enquirer reporters witnessed, on recently sprayed farms the air is heavy with a stifling chemical stench. Breathing is difficult and the pesticide residue covers everything.”

Are we now to believe this scene never happened and that Chiquita doesn’t spray pesticides on its farm workers? ...

When all is said and done, the settlement among the Enquirer, Gannett and Chiquita looks like nothing more than a complex business deal. Lost in the official mumbo-jumbo about unethical reporting, violations of company standards and possible criminal charges is a simple journalistic concept — the truth.

(Fox is editor and co-publisher of the Cincinnati CityBeat, from which this is excerpted.)

A LETTER BY DON CANAAN: I understand that you made a commitment to Chiquita, and that reporter Mike Gallagher had to be fired, but does the Enquirer Online have to imitate the U.S.S.R. and rewrite history?

I searched for any references to the Chiquita investigation and found they had been erased or deleted. Are you going to recall all past issues from libraries, etc., and razor blade those articles?

(From The Cincinnati Enquirer)

HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.: Concerning the outbreak of journalistic malfeasance, the news is not that these things happen, but that they are beginning to have consequences. Readers of The Cincinnati Enquirer didn’t need to hear about stolen voice mails to figure out that there was something fishy about its monumental series on Carl Lindner’s Chiquita banana empire.

“The slant of your Chiquita-related ‘investigative reporting’ has taken the art of making mountains out of molehills to a new low,” wrote one. When introducing the series in May, the paper’s editor Larry Beaupre wrote, “We are confident that thorough reporting for more than a year has resulted in an accurate and eye-opening portrait.” What followed might have been a mildly interesting, and certainly exhaustive, account of a multinational business in the developing world, with all the problems of organizing a global trade in a perishable fruit, one subject to taxes and tariffs and fungus and insects. But this wouldn’t have been journalism with a capital J. So instead we got the banana business as Satan’s playpen.

A few weeks later, the same Mr. Beaupre was groveling on the front page, offering $10 million to forestall legal action by Chiquita and apologizing “for unethical and unlawful conduct and for the untrue conclusions.”

That was lawyer-speak for the purloining of company voice mails. Local prosecutors and the FBI are investigating, and star reporter Mike Gallagher has been fired. But we already get the feeling the paper compounded its cravenness by disavowing the facts it gathered, not just the means by which it gathered them.

A true story, even if dishonestly come by, is different from a false story. What this story desperately needed was what Mr. Beaupre should have provided, an intellectually honest context.

These events ought to have a familiar ring. Just over 20 months ago, one of the fearless scribes at The New York Times was handed some tapes secretly recorded by an executive at Texaco, and interesting tapes they were, in a boring sort of way.

They captured the normal back and forth you might expect from a group of colleagues who knew each other and didn’t assume a tape recorder was running. What might have been treated as a revealing slice of life instead had to be presented, in keeping with stupid journalistic convention, as a smoking gun. To this day, it remains lore that Texaco executives used racial epithets when, in fact, they didn’t.

Now it has happened again ...

(Jenkins wrote this for The Wall Street Journal. Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal © 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.)

A LETTER BY STEVE KOESTERMAN: I speak for a large percentage of Enquirer readers that unless you work for Chiquita, are a lawyer for Chiquita or your last name is Lindner, no one read your 18-page report on bananas. In a society where we don’t care what our president does in his personal life as long as the economy is good, we feel the same way about bananas. As long as I can continue to get my bananas at the local store, who cares where they came from and what the conditions are in Costa Rica? I’m sure strawberries, apples and melons have a sad story, too.

(From The Cincinnati Enquirer)

EUGENE PATTERSON: We in the news business might have seen it coming.

Journalists assumed the adversary stance toward government when the opposition party flagged in hostility. Press-conference television favored the reporter whose questions turned from firm but fair to rude and accusing. TV then conferred the celebrity of tube exposure on the quick and glib.

Celebrity brought money and glory to those reporters swift with the sound bite. Generous speaker fees set the famous ones to writing windy orations instead of muscular news stories. The rumpled reporter chewing on his pencil got his suit pressed and his hair styled and wound up onstage instead of off-camera where reporters belong.

Higher pay and lower modesty in the ranks coincided with a trend of newsroom brass to go wobbly.

This-is-a-reporter’s newspaper had a second translation: We-are-disempowering-our-subeditors. And reporters received a companion message that the ones who wrote oh-my-God exposes or investigations that put the mayor in jail were the ones whom the editor was going to nominate for the Pulitzer Prize.

With mid-level editors getting out of the way and the risk-reward system plain to see, not every ambitious reporter was going to remember the bedrock value of decent journalism, which is: Cut no corners. Remnants remained of a 1960s foolishness called New Journalism, which suggested it was all right to improve on a true story the way Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were doing it in “In Cold Blood” and “The Executioner’s Song.”

And here in the Matt Drudge era you can write anything on the Internet, true or not, and find some of the garbage seeping into the family newspaper.

Against such a background of values gone soggy, we’ve now seen Janet Cooke and Patricia Smith and Stephen Glass made up stuff in such pillar publications as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The New Republic.

The rein obviously lay too loose also against the neck of the beast of herd enmity. Such fashionable enmities include those toward the military, so CNN/Time wrongly reported the Army had used sarin against U.S. defectors in Laos; against business, so The Cincinnati Enquirer’s reporter used stolen documents to try to tar Chiquita; against the CIA, so the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News had to retract its innuendo of U.S. complicity in Los Angeles narcotics imports, and so on.

Newly missing was the crusty deskman who use to warn: “You’re making a stove out of steel wool here.”

(Patterson is editor emeritus of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. This is adapted from an article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal and the Times.)

JOHN G. CRAIG: I reject all the easy explanations: Standards are not what they used to be; the pressure to occupy ‘’a room at the top’’ gets more and more intense with each passing year; post-Watergate emphasis on ‘’gotcha journalism’’ creates a climate where reporters and their employers are encouraged to outdo each other. One reason I do this is that no explanation fits all here.

The two writers who made up quotes and people because reality was not quite dramatic enough for them were guilty of indiscretions that are very different from what happened in the nerve gas and Chiquita stories. I have had personal experience as an editor with reporters guilty of writing fiction as truth, and most editors who have been around for any length of time would probably say the same thing: As long as people are involved, there is going to be deviant behavior. And newspapers are “people-intense,’’ to say the least.

What is notable, I would argue, is how firm retribution was in both cases and how forthcoming those responsible at the Globe and New Republic were in admitting their publication’s mistakes. Given the explosive growth in the number of journalists at work in the United States over the past 20 years, there is some solace in the fact that lapses of this sort are so rare.

(Craig wrote this for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of which he is editor.)

JOSH GETLIN: The swift firings of Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith and New Republic reporter Stephen Glass served as reminders that such fakery is unacceptable in a business that prides itself on credibility. For some, the cases were aberrations; but for others, they were grim confirmation that a disturbing cultural trend in America — the blurring of lines between fact and fiction — may be shadowing the news business. And given the mounting pressures on journalists to “entertain,” some experts fear that fictionalization of the news may become more common. “The confusion of fact and fiction is turning journalism news into entertainment,” charges columnist and author Richard Reeves. “And you saw proof of that in the Boston Globe and New Republic stories. ... You saw writers feeling they had to juice up their stories to make them more interesting to readers ...”

“This confusion (about fact and fiction) is a problem,” says Tom Goldstein, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. “Some newspapers today value writing more than reporting. You don’t hear people saying now that someone is a hell of a fact-finder. You hear: ‘That person is a hell of a writer.’ ” And to be a writer in this culture sometimes means shading the truth. This is a world, after all, where consumers are hard-pressed to tell the difference between the truth or fiction of movies like “JFK,” TV news “re-enactments” of car crashes that never took place, so-called “nonfiction novels” that bend the truth, fictitious memoirs and the like ...

“The best journalism often reads like a novel, and it’s hard to tell truth from fiction sometimes,” says David Rosenthal, who heads Simon & Schuster’s trade-book division. “Telling the truth remains important, but the way you tell it has broadened, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

It all depends on how much you’re willing to believe. Oliver Stone’s “JFK” may have been only partially factual, but it didn’t hurt him at the box office. Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss,” a best-selling memoir of incest, sparked charges from some critics that she had made up the story. Joe McGuinniss’ biography of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) was filled with intimate conversations the author couldn’t possibly have witnessed.

“The pressure to make stories about the real seem perfectly packaged and seamless is there,” says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. “If anything contributes to these (Smith and Glass) incidents, it’s the rising expectation of the juicy quote, the colorful character, the copy that sparkles because of tough competition with other media.”

To be sure, Rosen and other experts note that these recent incidents are the exception rather than the rule. “I wouldn’t go overboard on this,” says Ed Guthman, USC journalism professor and a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor. “There have always been some reporters who (invented material) and I think it says a lot more about human nature than anything else.”

(Getlin wrote this for the Los Angeles Times)

MICHAEL R. FANCHER: Unfortunately, these embarrassments taint all working journalists by magnifying and distorting the problems inherent in our craft. Truth-telling is hard enough, even when one is absolutely committed to it.

The most dedicated journalists will make honest mistakes that damage credibility. They don’t need the added tarnish brought on by those who break the rules.

Even more, unfortunately, these embarrassments are not coincidental. Each represents the wrong response to competitive pressures to grab public attention, to rise above the cacophony of media noise. The pressure to be first and to be noticed is pushing individual journalists and news organizations down the wrong path.

It’s truth that gets and holds public attention. It’s the honest pursuit of truth that earns public respect. It’s owning up to one’s mistakes that builds public trust.

As outrageous as these misdeeds are, they are not unimaginable in the most principled newsroom. They remind us that news judgment is a collection of fine lines that often become clear-cut only in retrospect.

(Fancher wrote this for The Seattle Times, of which he is executive editor.)